In its Obsession with Silencing Tommy Robinson, a Pusillanimous Establishment Abandons Treasured British Ideal of ‘Fair Play’

May 25 will be marked as a day of infamy for British justice. On that day, political activist Tommy Robinson was arrested outside a Leeds courthouse, where, as a citizen journalist employing normal journalistic strategies, he was livestreaming commentary to Facebook, as several Muslim defendants involved in infamous grooming gangs arrived for their trial proceeding.

Robinson was doing nothing illegal. But the police arrested him for “breaching the peace.” Within hours, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 13 months incarceration, whereupon he was whisked off to Hull prison.

He did not have a lawyer present, because he was not given time or permission to arrange for one.

One does not normally see such jurisprudential hastiness outside of police or authoritarian states like North Korea, Cuba and China, and certainly virtually never in democratic countries.

To compound the show trial effect, the judge ordered a total media blackout in Britain. News stories already posted online by various outlets were speedily withdrawn. Naturally, this had the effect of fomenting global indignation and condemnation. On May 29, the ban was lifted, and British media are now reporting on the case.

Who is this guy? And why do the British police seem to hate/fear him so much?

Tommy, now 35 (and whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon; he uses a pseudonym to blunt the effects of his activism on his family), is a working-class bloke from “shithole” Luton, where he grew up and still lives.

He’s no angel. Robinson often speaks candidly of his “misspent youth” as a football hooligan, involving violent brawls and a few stints in jail.

He’s also no racist, although his detractors paint him as one. But he is a patriot, and one might say he became a “triggered” patriot when the town of Luton’s cultural character degraded as a small, but aggressive number of the growing Muslim population, about 30,000 strong in a population of 240,000, fell under the sway of Luton-based Islamist crusader Anjem Choudary and a hardcore group of extremists.

For 20 years Choudary preached hatred internationally via Youtube and other outlets with impunity. (Detectives in Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command assessed two decades worth of material held on 333 electronic devices containing 12.1TB of data.) He was finally convicted in 2016 for urging acolytes to support ISIS.

Pivotal to a number of Islamist groups, Choudary played a critical role in radicalizing an estimated 100 British and European terrorists.

A tipping point emerged for Robinson in a local recruitment drive for the Taliban and a 2010 protest against a parade of Royal Anglian Regiment troops back from a tour of Afghanistan. Galvanized into action, Robinson formed the English Defence League, which marked his rise to prominence and controversy.

The EDL was immediately branded far right and assumed to be both racist and dangerous. I won’t defend the EDL, which Tommy eventually quit in 2013, because it did attract some truly nasty types, and did in word and action give the impression of bigotry against all Muslims.

I will defend Robinson, who is comfortable with Luton as a multi-racial society and has never said a racist thing, but who dislikes Islam – which is his right – and the values fundamentalist Muslims espouse.

Here it must be added that the authorities, from the police right up to the highest levels of government, have consistently applied a double standard in their treatment of what constitutes hate speech and breaches of the peace and so forth when applied to the words and actions of Islamists – generally ignored – and apparent hate emanating from Robinson and his followers. And that double standard, based in a policy of multicultural appeasement (and fear of repercussions) was, understandably, what drove Robinson’s rage.

Nothing so blatantly and gruesomely demonstrates this double standard than the systemic cover-up by police, social services and politicians of the Muslim grooming gangs, whose scale, as noted in a recent Quillette.com article, “almost defies belief.”

In Rotherham especially, but also in Rochdale, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, Bristol, and now Telford, thousands of young girls, most but not all white, were continually drugged, beaten, pimped out and raped over the course of years by gangs of men of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin.

Cultural misogyny motivated these gangs’ actions, but willed institutional blindness enabled them. Nobody wanted to appear racist, so everyone turned a blind eye. The ruination of these children’s lives was thought to be a worthwhile sacrifice to avoid public exposure of an ugly cultural fissure, which led to the complicity of the entire child-protection infrastructure in its cover-up.

Tommy Robinson wasn’t having it. He wasn’t having any of the hypocrisy he saw in the chattering classes regarding painful truths about Islam-dominated culture. So he spoke out, loudly and abrasively. (So did others, including influential British Muslims like Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Mohammed Shafiq, and Nazir Afza, but less bullishly and less, so to speak, kinetically.)

And that made the multiculturalist pit bulls and the guilty parties in the rape-laundering scheme crazy. The words “enemy of the state” (the title of his gripping – and also entertaining – book about his adventures down the politically correct rabbit hole) are not hyperbole in Robinson’s case. That is how he has been treated. One needn’t be a conspiracy theorist to feel persuaded, on the evidence, that Robinson was viewed as such a thorn in the establishment’s side that his literal disappearance was a devoutly wished for, and even abetted, objective.

Exhibit A in support of this statement is the 2015 attack on Robinson in a maximum-security prison (even though his conviction for mortgage fraud called for minimum security), where he was housed alongside murderers and radicalized Muslims who hated him, and were a clear danger to him.

Prisoners told him a bounty had been offered for his death. Luckily he was warned of a plot to throw boiling sugar water over him, “which rips off your face,” and thus narrowly escaped severe injury and disfiguration.

Robinson believes the police refused to segregate him for his safety with a view to enabling harm. A not unreasonable conclusion in the circumstances.

Robinson has many supporters around the world, a demographic growing exponentially with every new revelation of state-sponsored act of persecution. Indignation has resulted in practical action. One of the more productive responses to his plight can boast a proudly Canadian link.

On April 3, 2016, Valerie Price, head of the patriotic organization, Act! For Canada, committed to fund raise in order to engage a proper (i.e. competent but costly) lawyer to help Robinson avoid yet another incarceration (a luxury he had previously been unable to afford, yet which would likely have saved him a great deal of grief).

In collaboration with anti-Jihadism activist Elsa Schieder, Price launched a campaign, and a week later, they had raised over £20,000 for Robinson’s legal defence. After his top-tier lawyer decimated the “case” against him, Robinson walked out of Peterborough Magistrates Court a free man.

This latest juridical caper may have been an anarchical bridge too far even for those who find Robinson’s tactics uncomfortably abrasive. Over 400,00 people have signed a petition demanding Robinson’s release. As cultural critic Stefan Molyneux articulated for many of us in his article, “The War on Tommy Robinson”: “Explain why white men accused of pedophilia are allowed to be photographed and questioned by reporters on court steps, while Pakistani Muslims are not. Explain why a police force that took three decades to start dealing with Muslim rape gangs was able to arrest and incarcerate a journalist within a few scant hours. Explain why a man can be arrested for breaching the peace when no violence has taken place.

To the British government: explain your actions, or open Tommy Robinson’s cell and let him walk free.”